Eureka looked out the window and watched pale golden buttonwood leaves drift over Ander’s empty space. “What do you say we don’t study—”
“Say no more. I’m your gal. Whatcha got in mind, sister?”
“Well …” Was there really any point in lying? With Cat, probably not. Eureka raised her shoulders sheepishly. “A drive-by at Manor’s cross-country practice?”
“Why, Miss Boudreaux.” Cat’s eyes took on their captivating glimmer, usually reserved for older guys. “Whatever took you so long to say so?”
Manor was several times bigger than Evangeline and several times less funded. The only other coed Catholic school in Lafayette, it had long been Evangeline’s chief rival. The student body was more diverse, more religious, more competitive. Manor kids seemed cold and aggressive to Eureka. They won district championships in most sports most years, though last year Evangeline went to State for cross-country. Cat was determined to hold on to the title this year.
So it was like crossing enemy lines when Cat pulled into the Manor Panthers’ jock lot, which opened onto the bayou.
When Eureka opened her door, Cat frowned down at her own knee-length navy uniform skirt. “We can’t go out there dressed like this.”
“Who cares?” Eureka got out of the car. “Are you worried they’ll think Evangelinos are here to sabotage them?”
“No, but there might be some studs out there working up a sweat, and I look like a total frau in this skirt.” She unlocked the trunk, her mobile closet. It was heaped with colorful prints, a lot of Lycra, and more shoes than a department store. “Cover me?”
Eureka shielded Cat and faced the track. She scanned the field for signs of Ander’s frame. But the sun was in her eyes and all the cross-country boys looked similarly tall and lanky from here.
“So. You’ve decided to get yourself a crush.” Cat rummaged through her trunk, muttering to herself about a belt she’d left at home.
“I don’t know if it’s that acute,” Eureka said. Was it? “He came over a couple nights ago—”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
Eureka heard a zipper and glimpsed Cat’s body shimmying out of something.
“It was nothing, really. I left some stuff in his car and he came by to return it. Brooks was there.” She paused, thinking about the moment she’d stood sandwiched between two boys on the brink of a fight. “Things were really tense.”
“Was Ander weird with Brooks or was Brooks weird with Ander?” Cat spritzed perfume on her neck. It smelled like honeydew and jasmine. Cat was a microclimate.
“What do you mean?” Eureka asked.
“Just”—Cat was hopping on one foot, fastening a high heel’s strap—“you know, Brooks can be rather possessive about you.”
“Really? You think so—” Eureka broke off, rising swiftly on her toes as a tall blond boy rounded the curve of the track ahead of them. “I think that’s Ander—no.” She lowered her heels back to the ground, disappointed.
Cat whistled in amazement. “Wow. You don’t think your crush is ‘that acute’? Are you kidding me? You were just crestfallen that that dude wasn’t him. I have never seen you like this.”
Eureka rolled her eyes. She leaned against the car and looked at her watch. “Are you dressed yet? It’s almost five; they’re probably about to start cooling down.” She and Cat didn’t have a lot of time.
“No comments on my look?”
When Eureka turned around, Cat was wearing a skintight leopard-print tube dress, black stilettos, and the little lynx beret they’d bought together last summer in New Orleans. She twirled, looking like a taxidermist’s centerfold. “I call it the Triple-Cat.” She made claws with her hands. “Rawr.”
“Careful.” Eureka nodded at the Manor kids on the field. “Those carnivores might eat you up.”
They crossed the parking lot, past the line of yellow buses waiting to take kids home, past the phalanx of orange water coolers and skinny-legged freshman boys doing sit-ups on the bleachers. Cat was getting catcalls.
“Hey, homie,” she purred at a black kid checking her out while he jogged past.
Eureka wasn’t used to seeing Cat around black kids. She wondered whether these boys saw her best friend as half white, the way white kids at Evangeline saw Cat as half black.
“He smiled!” Cat said. “Should I catch up? I don’t think I can run in this dress.”
“Cat, we came here to look for Ander, remember?”
“Right. Ander. Supertall. Skinny—not too skinny. Delightful blond curls. Ander.”
They stopped at the edge of the track. Even though Eureka had already run six miles that afternoon, when the toe of her shoe touched the pebbly red gravel, she got the urge to sprint.
They watched the team. Boys and girls staggered around the track, running at different speeds. All of them wore the same white polo shirt with the dark yellow collar and yellow running shorts.
“That ain’t him,” Cat said, her pointer finger following the runners. “And that ain’t him—cute, but not him. And that guy certainly ain’t him.” She frowned. “It’s weird. I can picture the aura he projects, but it’s hard to remember his face clearly. Maybe I just didn’t see him up close?”
“He’s unusual-looking,” Eureka said. “Not in a bad way. Striking.”
His eyes are like the ocean, she wanted to say. His lips are coral-colored. His skin holds the kind of power that makes a compass needle jump.
She didn’t see him anywhere.
“There’s Jack.” Cat pointed at a dark-haired beanpole with muscles who’d stopped to stretch on the side of the track. “He’s the captain. Remember when I played Seven Minutes in Heaven with him last winter? Want me to ask him?”
Eureka nodded, following Cat’s saunter toward the boy.
“Say, Jack.” Cat slid onto the bleacher above the one Jack’s outstretched leg was using. “We’re looking for a guy on your team named Ander. What’s his last name, Reka?”
Eureka shrugged.
So did Jack. “No Anders on this team.”
Cat kicked her legs out, crossed her ankles. “Look, we had that rained-out meet against you guys two days ago, and he was there. Tall lad, blond—help me out, Reka?”
Ocean eyes, she almost blurted out. Hands that could catch a falling star.
“Kinda pale?” she managed to say.
“Kinda not on the team.” Jack retied his running shoe and straightened up, signaling he was done.
“You’re kinda a crap captain if you don’t know your teammates’ names,” Cat called as he walked away.
“Please,” Eureka said with an earnestness that made Jack stop and turn around. “We really need to find him.”
The boy sighed. He walked back toward the girls, grabbed a black shoulder bag from under the bleachers. He pulled out an iPad, swiped it a few times. When he handed it to Eureka the screen displayed an image of the cross-country team posing on the bleachers. “Yearbook pictures were last week. This is everyone on the team. See your Xander here?”
Eureka pored over the photograph, looking for the boy she’d just seen in the parking lot, the one who’d hit her car, the one she couldn’t get out of her mind. Thirty young and hopeful boys smiled out at her, but none of them was Ander.
10
WATER AND POWER
Eureka squeezed a dab of coconut sunblock into her palm and slathered a second coat onto William’s white shoulders. It was a warm, sunny Saturday morning, so Brooks had driven Eureka and the twins down to his family’s camp on Cypremort Point at the edge of Vermilion Bay.
Everyone who lived along the southern stretch of Bayou Teche wanted a spot at the Point. If your family didn’t have a camp along the two-mile corridor of the peninsula near the marina, you made a friend whose family did. Camps were weekend homes, mostly an excuse to have a boat, and they ranged from little more than a trailer parked on a grassy lot to million-dollar mansions raised on cedar stilts, with private slips for boats. Hurricanes were commemorated by black paint markers on the camps’ front doors, denoting each point to which the water rose—Katrina ’05, Rita ’05, Ike ’08.
The Brookses’ camp was a four-bedroom clapboard with a corrugated aluminum roof and petunias potted in faded Folgers cans lining the windowsills. It had a cedar dock out back that looked endless in the afternoon sun. Eureka had known a hundred happy hours out there, eating pecan pralines with Brooks, holding a sugarcane fishing pole, its line painted green with algae.
The plan that day had been to fish for lunch, then pick up some oysters at the Bay View, the only restaurant in town. But the twins were bored with fishing as soon as the worms vanished beneath the murky water, so they’d all ditched their rods and driven up to the narrow stretch of beach looking out on the bay. Some people said the artificial beach was ugly, but when the sunlight glittered on the water, and the golden cordgrass rippled in the wind, and the seagulls cawed as they dipped low to fish, Eureka couldn’t imagine why. She slapped a mosquito off her leg and watched the black stillness of the bay at the edge of the horizon.
It was her first time near a big body of water since Diana’s death. But, Eureka reminded herself, this was her childhood; there was no reason to be nervous.
William was erecting a sand McMansion, his lips pursed in concentration, while Claire demolished his progress wing by wing. Eureka hovered over them with the bottle of Hawaiian Tropic, studying their shoulders for the slightest blush of pink.
“You’re next, Claire.” Her fingers rubbed lotion along the border of William’s inflatable orange water wings.
“Uh-uh.” Claire rose to her feet, knees caked with wet sand. She eyed the sunscreen and started to run away, but she tripped over the sand McMansion’s pool.
“Hurricane Claire strikes again.” Brooks hopped up to chase her.
When he came back with Claire in his arms, Eureka went at her with the sunscreen. She writhed, shrieking when Brooks tickled her.
“There.” Eureka snapped the lid back on the bottle. “You’re protected for another hour.”
The kids ran off, sand architecture abandoned, to look for nonexistent seashells at the water’s edge. Eureka and Brooks flopped back on the blanket, pushed their toes down into cool sand. Brooks was one of the few people who remembered to always sit on her right side so she could hear him when he talked.
The beach was uncrowded for a Saturday. A family with four young kids sat to the left, everyone angling for shade beneath a blue tarp pitched across two poles. Scattered fishermen roved the shore, their lines slicing into the sand before the water washed them clean. Farther down, a group of middle school kids Eureka recognized from church threw ropes of seaweed at each other. She watched the water lap against the twins’ ankles, reminding herself that four miles out, Marsh Island kept the larger Gulf waves at bay.
Brooks passed her a dewy can of Coke from the picnic basket. For a guy, Brooks was strangely good at picnic packing. There was always a variety of junk and healthy food: chips and cookies and apples, turkey sandwiches and cold drinks. Eureka’s mouth watered at the sight of a Tupperware of some of his mom Aileen’s leftover spicy shrimp étouffée over dirty rice. She took a swig of the soda, leaned back on her elbows, resting the cold can between her bare knees. A sailboat cruised east in the distance, its sails blurring into the low clouds on the water.